Alexander the Great

CHAPTER 2 THE APPRENTICE

The young girl was helped down from the ship onto the open shore.

She was Polyxena, a princess of the Molossians, the leading tribe of the small realm of Epirus in northwestern Greece. She had just landed on the rocky island of Samothrace, some miles south of the coastline of Thrace.

The island looked as if a colossal boulder of granite and basalt had been tossed into the sea. Here and there, white foaming waterfalls streamed down precipitous cliffs. There was no cultivatable earth and the few inhabitants eked out a living, as they do now, from fishing and tourism. In Polyxena’s day, visitors stayed in the island’s only urban settlement, which was guarded by cyclopean walls built from trimmed granite rocks. They came as pilgrims, for not far from the town stood the Sanctuary of the Great Gods in a wooded gorge.

Here arcane rites, or Mysteries, took place in honor of deities of the underworld, among them the fertility goddess the Great Mother. Others have enigmatic non-Greek names—Axieros, Axiokersa, Axiokersos, and Kasmilos. The nature of the ceremonies was a deep secret and adepts were silent about them, so that little information has come down to us; but their main attraction will have been the promise of an afterlife. Anyone could take part, free or slave, man or woman, adults or children, and people came from across the eastern Mediterranean.

It seems that prayers were offered up and pigs and sheep were sacrificed on rock altars. Libations were poured into ritual pits. Initiates underwent two stages. There were ritual dances in a large hall followed by a showing of sacred symbols in a smaller room. We may imagine torches in the darkness. Successful participants were probably given a purple belt and an iron ring to mark their sacred status and to symbolize the protection that initiation would confer.

Every summer, perhaps in July, a festival was staged, which centered on the performance of a sacred play featuring a ritual wedding. Although the island remained open for spiritual business all the year round, it may have been for this annual event that Polyxena and her family came to Samothrace.

During the ceremonies she met for the first time a dashing young prince, Philip of Macedonia. She was perhaps ten years old and the date was probably 365. This was soon after Philip had returned to his homeland following his spell as a hostage in Thebes. The trip to Samothrace may have been a celebration to mark his release.

We are told that the prince fell for Polyxena, whom we can suppose to have been a pretty and lively girl, and the couple were engaged. Presumably this was not an erotic infatuation, but a cool assessment of her likely future attractiveness. Rather more to the point, Epirus was of strategic importance, lying as it did on Macedonia’s northern frontier. A marriage alliance would cement friendly relations between the two countries. It is perfectly possible that the encounter in a famous religious setting was planned in advance. This would enhance the authority or distinction of a betrothal that was as much a business proposition as a romantic affair.

At some point Polyxena acquired another name, Myrtale, after the Greek word for myrtle. The plant was sacred to the goddess of love, Aphrodite, who may have had a connection with the Mysteries at Samothrace. This suggests that the name was conferred on the girl to mark her engagement to Philip. Alternatively, she adopted it a little later at a coming-of-age ceremony.

The wedding was solemnized about 358 or 357 when Polyxena or Myrtale was of childbearing age. It must have been on this auspicious occasion that the young princess name-shifted again. Doubtless inspired by the Macedonian festival of Olympian Zeus, she was addressed from now on as Olympias, the name by which she is known to history.

—

ELITE WOMEN IN ANCIENT Greece were expected to spend their lives indoors and to concern themselves exclusively with household matters. They did not attend dinner parties even in their own homes. They might be briefly seen shopping in the marketplace under the watchful eyes of a domestic slave, or participating in religious festivals. Apart from their close male relatives, they met men only at weddings and funerals. The ideal female was one whom nobody talked about.

But in the northern kingdoms, such as Macedonia and Epirus, the situation was very different. A noblewoman or female member of a royal family played a far more prominent religious, social, and, in some circumstances, political role. She could hold and dispose of her own property and act as guardian for her children when minors. She engaged in diplomacy and corresponded with her relatives abroad; it is likely that she was literate. Throughout her life Olympias was a fervent letter-writer.

The career of Queen Eurydice, as reported, offered a ruthless role model for ambitious princesses such as Olympias. The nearest comparators to the Macedonian woman were to be found in the heroic pages of Homer and the great Athenian tragedies. These queens and princesses are ferociously independent.

Among them, Clytemnestra, queen of Mycenae in the Peloponnese, the peninsula that makes up southern Greece, ruled her kingdom without trouble during her husband Agamemnon’s ten-year absence at the siege of Troy. When he returned home she stabbed him to death in the bath after trapping him inside a voluminous purple robe. The murder was payback for the sacrificial death of their daughter, Iphigenia, at her father’s hands.

Here where I struck I stand and see my task achieved.

Yes, this is my work and I claim it.

Another fictional woman with agency was the witch Medea, who set up house in the Greek city of Corinth with Jason of the Argonauts. A weak but ambitious man, he decided to marry the king’s daughter. Medea, enraged, sent the bride a splendid but poisoned wedding dress and slaughtered her own two sons by Jason.

She admitted to no regrets. “It was not for you or your princess to trample on my love and live a life of pleasure, laughing at me,” she said. “So call me lioness, yes, if you wish to, for I have my claws in your heart as you deserve.”

We have no evidence that Olympias was a student of Greek tragedy, but her character and career betray a remarkable family resemblance to these women of legend. Few laughed at her with impunity—not even her husband.

—

SOME TIME AFTER THEIR MARRIAGE, Philip visited his wife’s bedroom to have sex with her. He was disconcerted to find a snake stretched out alongside her in her bed as she slept. Plutarch tells us this had the effect of cooling the king’s ardor and that he seldom came to sleep with the queen thereafter.

This would appear to have all the markings of a tall story. However, Olympias was a spiritual woman. An initiate of the transcendental Orphic religion, she took part, as did many Macedonian women, in the Bacchic rites of Dionysus. He was the god of transcendence through the wine harvest, theater, and out-of-body experiences.

Worshippers, mainly women but also men, flocked out into wooded mountains. They became delirious with excitement and began to rave. Exactly what took place during these nocturnal observances was a deep secret accessed only by initiates, but it seems that the climax involved the eating of raw goat flesh. This may have restaged the fate of Dionysus himself, who in his babyhood was ripped to pieces and eaten before being born again at the command of Zeus, king of the gods. The deep secret must have centered on the magical cycle of life, death, and rebirth. This gave new hope to adepts, desperate to ensure futurity.

We shall not go far wrong if we regard these rites as orgies both in the original and the contemporary senses of the word—namely, a frenzied mystical trance and sexual license.

Half a century or so earlier, during his stay at Pella under King Archelaus, the aged Euripides wrote his last play and masterpiece, The Bacchae, which tells a tragic story of the lethal power Dionysus exerts over his followers. A chorus of female devotees sings,

What sweetness is in the mountains!

Whenever the Bacchant, wearing the sacred fawn skin,

Falls to the ground after the running dance,

He hunts the blood of the slaughtered goat,

A raw-eaten delight.

Stupefied by the god, the worshipper sees a transformed paradisal landscape:

The plain flows with milk, it flows with wine,

It flows with the nectar of bees.

The air is thick with the smoke of Syrian myrrh.

As a member of the royal family, the queen probably played a leadership role in the Bacchic revels. Plutarch writes that Olympias used

to enter into these states of possession and surrender herself to the inspiration of the god with even wilder abandon than the others. She would introduce into the festal procession numbers of large snakes, hand-tamed. They terrified the male spectators as they raised their heads from the wreaths of ivy and the sacred winnowing-baskets, or twined themselves around the wands and garlands of the women.

Snakes were associated in ancient times with religious cults, representative, or at least suggestive of, the phallus. The god of medicine, Asclepius, used them as healers. The dead were sometimes believed to return as serpentine revenants.

Many years later when Pella had dwindled into a village, the stories about the Macedonian queen received some surprising confirmation. The Greek author Lucian reported in the second century A.D. that snakes were still to be found there, perhaps descended from those belonging to Olympias. They were

great serpents, quite tame and gentle, so that they were kept by women, slept with children, let themselves be stepped upon, were not angry when they were stroked, and took milk from the breast just like babies.

Whichever way one looked at the matter, Olympias was a formidable agent in a man’s world.

—

THE CHILDHOOD OF HER SON, Alexander, is encrusted with legends invented after he had grown up and indeed postmortem, but they are worth noting because they reflect authentic insights of his contemporaries into his personality. They show him to have been as much of a handful as his mother.

From about the age of seven the boy left the care of women and received schooling in the Greek manner. He was provided with a paedogogus called Leonidas, a relative of Olympias. A paedogogus was usually a trustworthy slave who accompanied a boy to his classes. He made sure his charge behaved politely and obediently and was protected from unwelcome sexual advances. But in this case Leonidas acted as a kind of headmaster and supervised a range of specialist teachers. He became, in effect, the boy’s moral tutor.

Leonidas was a severe disciplinarian. The young Alexander accepted, but never forgot, a reprimand. Once the frugal and austere paedogogus caught him throwing an excessive amount of frankincense onto an altar while sacrificing. He told the boy: “Once you have conquered the lands that produce this spice you can be as extravagant as you like. Till then, don’t waste what you’ve got.”

Years later, at the siege of Gaza, when he could access as much frankincense as he liked, Alexander sent Leonidas half a ton of it together with a large quantity of myrrh, with the message “I have sent you plenty of myrrh and frankincense so that from now on you don’t need to be mean to the gods any longer.” This was generosity so crushing as to qualify as revenge. Alexander had an excellent memory and he watered his grudges.

It appears that in due course a tutor took over Alexander’s education, a boorish (but also well-born) personality called Lysimachus. He understood the art of flattery and apparently got the job by emphasizing the royal family’s fine Homeric family tree. He referred to Alexander as Achilles, a much appreciated compliment. He called Philip by the name of Achilles’ father, Peleus, and spoke of himself as Phoenix, the trusty warrior who had helped raise Achilles as a child and looked after him as if he were his son.

—

A FAMOUS STORY ABOUT ALEXANDER, perceptive if perhaps apocryphal, throws light on his ability to notice a telling detail, however slight, and use it to his advantage.

Thessaly with its broad plains in northern Greece was well-known for the high quality of its horses. Then one day, perhaps in 347 when the little crown prince was about eight or nine, a tall, finely bred stallion was presented to Philip for sale by a Thessalian dealer. He was a beautiful animal, in his prime, black with a white blaze on his forehead. He had been branded with the mark of his owner, a bull’s head, and was named by the Greek word for bull’s head, Bucephalas. The king showed some interest, despite the extraordinarily high asking price of thirteen talents, and went down to the plain to watch the horse’s trials.

The animal proved to be unmanageable and evidently had not yet been broken in. He was upset by the shouting of the grooms and refused to allow anyone to mount him. Philip was angry and ordered that Bucephalas be taken away.

A small voice piped up. “What a horse they are losing,” said Alexander. “And all because they’ve no idea how to handle him, or don’t dare try.” He repeated his complaint several times and his father realized the child was upset.

“Are you criticizing your elders and betters?” Philip asked. “Do you think you know more than them or could handle a horse better?”

“Well, I could handle this one better.”

“If you can’t, what punishment will you deserve for being so cheeky?”

“I’ll pay for the horse!”

Everyone laughed, but Alexander was being serious. He agreed to the bet with his father.

Alexander walked briskly up to Bucephalas and took hold of his bridle and turned him to face the sun. This was crucial, for he alone had noticed that the horse shied at the sight of his shadow as it fell in front of him and moved whenever he did.

He ran alongside Bucephalas, stroking him to calm him down. Once the horse had recovered his spirits, Alexander threw aside his cloak and vaulted onto his back. He used the bit cautiously and then gave him his head. Bucephalas, his confidence fully restored, broke into a gallop.

The king and his court were on tenterhooks, but once they saw that the boy had mastered the horse, broke into spontaneous applause. Philip, we are told, wept for joy. He kissed Alexander when he had dismounted and is supposed to have remarked: “My boy, we’ll have to find a suitable kingdom for you. Macedonia is too small.”

A Corinthian merchant and aristocrat called Demaratus was a strongly pro-Macedonian statesman and a guest-friend of Philip. To be a “guest-friend” was to be protected by the iron taboos of ancient Greek hospitality. A traveler on political and commercial missions, Demaratus was present at the incident with the horse and immediately volunteered its selling price. He gave Bucephalas to Alexander.

Just as he had an indelible memory for an insult, so the boy never forgot a favor. Loyalty was his watchword. The Corinthian will reappear in this long story.

—

ALEXANDER WAS OBLIGED TO grow up quickly. He was introduced to the alcoholic world of Macedonian diplomacy when still only a child. In 346, the year after his acquisition of Bucephalas, a political delegation from the city of Athens, the most formidable sea power of the age, arrived in Pella and was treated to the usual boisterous banquet. As the wine went round after the meal, the ten-year-old crown prince played music on the cithara (a kind of lyre). Doubtless he acquitted himself admirably—perhaps too admirably, for it may have been on this occasion that Philip asked drily: “Aren’t you ashamed to pluck the strings so well?” It was enough if a ruler could find time to listen while others played. That was the point and the boy took it. We hear no more of the cithara.

The presence of foreign embassies in Pella gave Alexander an opportunity to soak up detail about the world beyond Macedonia. He was especially interested in the great, mysterious empire of the Persians, which in the unforgotten past had conquered and annexed his father’s kingdom. In the same year as his performance at the feast for the Athenian envoys, a famous public intellectual, Isocrates, issued a much read and much debated pamphlet inviting Philip to lead all the Greeks on a military expedition that would pay the Great King back for his predecessors’ invasions not only of their homelands, but also of the Ionian cities of Asia. The king had not taken up the offer, but his son could dream of leading a crusade.

One day envoys from the Great King in faraway Susa, the Persian capital, arrived in Macedonia. Philip happened to be away, so Alexander, still a boy, received them in his place. According to Plutarch, he cross-examined them carefully, showing no interest in the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon nor in how the Great King was dressed, but only in matters of substance.

What especially won his attention was the system of roads the Persians had established. Old caravan routes had been transformed into military highways, and bridges or fords were installed at river crossings. This enabled imperial troops to move fast to trouble spots. At intervals, state rest houses provided accommodation and a change of horses: this allowed official messengers to communicate speedily with the provinces, and state dignitaries to travel easily around the empire.

The incident gives us an Alexander who was a greedy consumer of data. He seems already to have grasped the fact that a military victory required competent logistics and organization. A good general—and we may be sure that he already imagined himself as one—found out all he could about the land in which he intended to campaign before marching into it.

—

PHILIP AND OLYMPIAS WERE very proud of their son, but two aspects of his personality worried them—his violently impulsive nature and, after the arrival of puberty, his surprising lack of interest in sex.

Alexander resented and resisted direct orders, although he could be persuaded by an appeal to reason. His parents took the view that he needed, in the words of the great Athenian tragedian, Sophocles, “the rudder’s guidance and the bit’s restraint.” The task of training him could not be left to the common run of teachers and the routine curriculum of poetry, music, and rhetoric, or the art of public speaking.

So who in the civilized Greek world was the leading spokesman for rationality? There was no competition. At the age of forty, Aristotle was a well-known philosopher with a high reputation. He had studied for twenty years at Plato’s informal university, the Academy in Athens. He conducted groundbreaking zoological research in the eastern Mediterranean, for in the ancient world there was little distinction drawn between philosophical thought and practical research. He also wrote and taught.

Aristotle spoke with a lisp; he had skinny calves and small eyes. He dressed well, wore rings, and had his hair cut short. His smart appearance contradicted the example of Socrates, the very model of a Greek philosopher, who seldom washed either his clothes or himself.

In 343 Philip decided to hire Aristotle as tutor to his thirteen-year-old son. Recruiting him was made all the easier because his father had been an official physician at the Macedonian court during the reign of Philip’s father, Amyntas III. In their late teens they had met at Pella and so were already acquainted. The philosopher understood Macedonian culture in general and the exotic ways of the Macedonian royal family in particular.

Aristotle was a tough bargainer and only accepted the king’s invitation on the condition that he rebuild Aristotle’s native city, Stageira, a long-established city-state in the three-pronged peninsula of Chalcidice. Philip had sacked it five years previously in one of his many wars, but, ever the dealmaker, he seldom objected to changing his mind. He agreed to the condition: the inhabitants, who had been sold into slavery, were bought back, and the city rose from the ground again and was repopulated. A new aqueduct was constructed and two shrines to Demeter, goddess of the harvest, were built.

It was wisely decided that Alexander and a group of pupils of his own age should be removed from the temptations of a capital city and a busy court. Aristotle held his classes at Mieza, a pastoral retreat, also called the Gardens of Midas after its rich orchards and vineyards. Here a shrine sacred to the Nymphs was linked to two natural caves. Part of the complex was protected from the sun by a portico. Plutarch writes that in his day, around the turn of the first century A.D., guides still

show you Aristotle’s stone seats, and the shady walks where he used to spend time. It appears that Alexander learned from him not only the principles of ethics and politics, but also something of those more abstruse and esoteric studies which philosophers do not impart to the general run of students, but reserve for spoken communication with the initiated.

Like every Greek boy, Alexander will have practiced gymnastics and competitive sports throughout his childhood and teen years and presumably undergone some form of military training, although the ancient sources are silent. An anecdote has come down to us which shows him in a priggish light. He was the fastest runner among the boys of his own age, but when they suggested he enter the Olympic Games, he demurred. The contest would be unfair, he claimed. If he won, it would merely be over commoners, and if he lost it would be the defeat of a prince.

On the academic front, little is known in detail of what Aristotle taught him, although it will have included elements of the regular Greek syllabus, the study of poetry, and the art of public speaking. His royal student seems to have shown an interest in a branch of rhetoric called eristics. This is the art of arguing a case from opposing points of view. Isocrates came to hear of this and was displeased. He wrote to Alexander, warning him to take care: kings command rather than debate.

Aristotle’s career shows an abiding emphasis on information gathering in many fields of research—literary, scientific, medical, biological, political, and philosophical. He collected maps (surely of special interest to the crown prince) and manuscripts. He revised and continued a list of winners at the Olympic Games and he commissioned reports on the constitutions of Greek states. These concerns must have been reflected in his curriculum.

Aristotle, who had an opinion about everything, pronounced on the geography of the world. The earth was a globe at the center of the universe and was “far smaller than some of the stars.” A long habitable band of land lay in each of the two hemispheres. They were separated by an impassably hot zone and were surrounded by endless water, the outer Ocean. There was not the slightest suggestion of a New World somewhere beyond the seas and awaiting discovery.

The band in the northern hemisphere began at the Atlantic coast of Africa (which the Greeks called Libya) and the Pillars of Heracles, and stretched as far as to the Punjab. Beyond the Pillars of Heracles and India lay nothing except sea, which severed the habitable land and prevented it forming a continuous belt around the earth. This caught Alexander’s imagination and to reach India and the shores of Ocean became one of his dreams.

Presumably Aristotle discussed politics with his pupils. This must have led to some tricky moments, for the general direction of Greek thought was toward republics, and more particularly the most appropriate constitutions for the small city-states that dominated the Hellenic political landscape. None of this will have pleased either king or crown prince. However, the philosopher saw a way round the difficulty: monarchy could qualify as an ideal constitution, provided the king possessed a high level of virtue (in Greek, aretē). In the Politics, he writes:

When therefore either a whole family or a single individual among people at large can be found, whose virtue is so outstanding as to outstrip all the rest, then it becomes just that this family should become royal and sovereign over all things, and that this one man should become king.

Aristotle was not free from the vices of his age. Slavery was widespread throughout the ancient world and he endorsed it as a social institution. He believed that “by nature some are free, others slaves, and that for these it is both just and expedient that they should serve as slaves.” He took a similarly dim view of foreigners. It was only right and proper that Greeks should rule non-Greeks; indeed, “non-Greeks and slaves are identical.”

Alexander was greatly impressed by Aristotle, whom he saw as a surrogate father (Philip being frequently absent on campaign), and by the practical bent of his ideas. He was evidently an industrious student, even though he applied his studies strictly to his own personal interests. He developed a fascination for the practical sciences and was much taken by the diagnosis and treatment of disease. As an adult, he set himself up as an amateur doctor, looking after his friends when they were sick and prescribing therapies and diets. Years later, one of his generals, Craterus, fell sick, and Alexander was alarmed to hear that he was to be given hellebore, a toxic plant used as a purgative. He wrote to the general’s doctor expressing his anxiety and prescribing the correct dosage.

Aristotle encouraged his charge’s passion for Homer. He is reported to have prepared a special, annotated edition of the Iliad, which his pupil regarded less as a work of art than as a manual on the art of war. This was the so-called “casket copy,” which in later times Alexander carried about with him everywhere on his travels, almost as a holy relic.

He prided himself on knowing the Iliad by heart as well as most of the Odyssey. When at leisure or at an evening meal, he liked to involve those around him in a literary game, asking them to quote favorite lines from Homer. He always insisted that the following line from the Iliad was the finest of them all.

He is two things: a good king and a mighty spearman too.

—

IT WAS A FINE spring day in the year 401, more than half a century previously, and a great battle was about to be fought on the left bank of the Euphrates.

And now it was noon, and the enemy were not yet in sight; but when afternoon was coming on, there was seen a rising dust, which appeared at first like a white cloud, but sometime later like a kind of blackness in the plain, extending over a great distance. As the enemy came nearer and nearer, there were presently flashes of bronze here and there, and spears and the hostile ranks came into sight. There were horsemen in white cuirasses on the left wing of the enemy….Next to them were troops with wicker shields and, farther on, hoplites with wooden shields which reached to their feet, these latter being Egyptians, people said; and then more horsemen and more bowmen.

This evocation of the prelude to battle is justly famous. It is taken from the Anabasis (or Journey Up-country), one of the great adventure stories of world literature. The author was a young Athenian, Xenophon, who was an officer in a force of ten thousand Greek mercenaries. These were hoplites (those heavily armed infantrymen who deployed in a tightly disciplined phalanx). They had been hired by a royal prince, Cyrus, namesake of the empire’s founder, to spearhead a revolt against his brother, Artaxerxes II.

The Great King’s army so outnumbered the enemy that Cyrus’s left wing did not extend beyond his brother’s center. It was here that, as was the practice of Persian monarchs, Artaxerxes was standing in his chariot and surrounded by elite troops and bodyguards.

The rebel mercenaries were stationed by the river, on Cyrus’s right wing. When their phalanx charged, the opposing troops lost no time in running away. The Greeks chased after them and, so far as they were concerned, victory was theirs. Then Cyrus, young and passionate, led a small cavalry force straight at his brother. Xenophon writes:

He caught sight of the Great King and the compact body of men around him, and immediately he lost control of himself and, shouting “I see the man,” rushed upon him and struck him on the breast and wounded him through his breastplate.

Artaxerxes fell from his horse and was brought out of the mêlée by some of his guardsmen. Cyrus’s bold maneuver had succeeded and many of the Great King’s people submitted to him. But he impetuously went on charging deep into the enemy ranks. By this time darkness was falling and all was confusion. Cyrus was wounded above the temple and then killed by a common foot soldier.

The battle was won, but the rebellion was over. Artaxerxes recovered and reigned for nearly half a century.

The victorious Greek mercenaries were dismayed by the turn of events. How would they be treated now? The Persians lured their generals to a conference and executed them. Their places were filled by new elected leaders, including Xenophon. The “ten thousand” resolved not to surrender, but to fight their way back to the Hellenic world. After great hardships and much fighting, they at last reached the coast of the Black Sea and safety. “The sea, the sea,” the men shouted joyfully as they crested rising ground and saw below them the wide expanse of blue water.

There were few Greek boys who were not told of this astonishing feat of endurance and survival and for the literate it was a best seller. Serious politicians and soldiers studied the episode—and so, we may be sure, did the Macedonian crown prince, inquisitive as he was about the military strength of the Persians.

So far as Alexander was concerned, Xenophon taught an essential truth. He observed:

An intelligent observer could see at a glance that while the King’s empire was strong in terms of lands and men, it was weak on account of its lengthened communications and the dispersal of its forces, if someone were to launch a quick military strike against it.

We have seen that the Great King governed through a system of provincial governors or satraps, but before modern technology information could not travel faster than a horse. It took ninety days to reach Sardis, on the Mediterranean coast, from Susa, the Persian capital. The satraps were almost impossible to control at such distances. Some were even allowed to establish hereditary dynasties. They had their own military capabilities, even if they exercised no control over garrison commanders, who acted as policing officials and reported directly to the Great King. As a further check on good behavior, a government inspector called the Eye of the King informed faraway Susa of what was going on in the empire.

But these precautions did not always work. In the middle of the fourth century, a number of satraps rebelled. When the insurgency, or more precisely a sequence of insurgencies, eventually collapsed, many were given back their old jobs. This was a clear sign—a tacit acknowledgment—that the center could not hold the periphery to its will.

The empire looked fierce, but in fact was frail. Its vast armies wore attractive and exotic uniforms, but were mostly ill-trained levies. The performance of the Greek regiment at Cunaxa and afterward demonstrated beyond any doubt the superiority of the hoplite and the phalanx. Xenophon was exaggerating when he wrote, “If any man makes war on Persia, whoever he may be, he can roam up and down the country to his heart’s content without striking a blow,” but he had a point. Most agreed with Aristotle when he asserted the natural superiority of the Hellenes.

Cyrus’s decision to hurl a collective spearhead of cavalry at his brother’s person was a brilliant, albeit risky, tactic. It eliminated the enemy’s numerical superiority by ending the battle before numbers could be brought fully into play. Once his hordes knew their master was dead, they had nothing left to fight for and would abandon the struggle. It was only Cyrus’s foolhardiness that transformed victory into defeat.

Alexander digested Xenophon’s book. He took from it two lessons: first, a determined invader could survive, even thrive, in the heart of the Persian empire; and, second, in battle it made tactical sense to seek to kill the Great King. A late Roman writer was not far wrong when he observed: “Alexander the Great would not have become great if Xenophon had never existed.”

—

SO FAR AS HAVING sex was concerned, Alexander was incurious. He showed no signs of attraction to women. This does not necessarily imply a particular orientation. Terms such as homosexuality or heterosexuality had not yet been invented. For him and his contemporaries, sex was what you did, not what you were.

Perhaps the general air of license at Pella put the boy off. Perhaps he simply had a low sex drive.

Alternatively, a psychoanalyst might point to his closeness to his mother, and how he would do anything to please her. They both had their life projects—and for each of them he was that project. Her love may have been embarrassingly smothering, but he could completely trust her.

Alexander was an eligible youth, not simply because of his high birth but also because of his good looks (or so we are told). He was short and muscular; his hair was blond “like a lion’s mane.” A straight nose rose to his forehead, which bulged slightly above the eyes; he had fair skin, and his chest and face would redden during exercise or under emotion; his eyes were heterochromatic, one being gray-blue and the other dark brown; his teeth were like small sharp pegs or nails. His voice was harsh and high-pitched, and early sculptural portraits give him a girlish air.

Plutarch writes of his “neck which was tilted slightly to the left” and of “a certain melting look.” A less friendly interpretation of the same evidence speaks of a lopsided face and watery eyes.

Alexander’s favorite sculptor, Lysippus, who worked in bronze, knew him from when he was a boy and was able to produce a convincing, and at the same time attractive, likeness. He was the only artist allowed to make three-dimensional representations of Alexander. This was not just a question of personal taste or a reward for flattery: sculpture and coins were among the best means a ruler had in those days of communicating his authority to large publics. Lysippus can be said to have invented, or at least to have asserted, the Alexander brand.

Although we cannot be absolutely sure today where the young Macedonian stood on the scale between beauty and ugliness, he seems to have been personable enough.

Olympias and Philip were worried about their son. They feared that he would grow up into an effeminate man, in our terms a queen, someone like King Archelaus. They decided to hire the services of an attractive prostitute from Thessaly called Callixeina. They paid her to go to bed with Alexander and take his virginity. His refusal to cooperate may be ascribed to a weak libido, but it is just as likely to have been due to irritation. Few boys like parents to choose their first date. But Olympias was nothing if not persistent and often begged her son to sleep with the girl, albeit without success.

For the simplest explanation of his behavior we could do worse than consider Alexander’s sexual orientation. He studied under Aristotle with a small class of contemporaries drawn from Philip’s inner circle, the sons of aristocrats and generals. One of these was a boy called Hephaestion, who had attracted Alexander by “his looks and boyishness.” The two fell for each other and were inseparable for the rest of their lives. It is hard to believe that there was not a sexual component in the relationship. But if there was, it will have been short-lived, for Plutarch reports that Alexander “used to say that sleep and sex, more than anything else, reminded him of his mortality. By this he meant that tiredness and pleasure both proceed from the same human weakness.”

We have already seen that homosexual activity was widespread among the Macedonian elite. But there was more to this than rough fun. Royal and aristocratic Macedonians looked southward, to Greece, for the conventions of male sexual behavior among the upper class.

These were highly specialized. Young male adults were expected to enter into love affairs with prepubertal teenaged boys. These affairs were a form of higher education. The senior partner, the lover or (in Greek) erastes, was expected to train the loved one, or eromenos, in the cultural norms of Hellenic society. By imitation the eromenos would learn from his erastes how to be a good citizen, how to compete physically in the gymnasium, and, in the long run, how to be brave on the battlefield (exemplified, most notably, by that regiment of lovers, the Theban Sacred Band). Once the eromenos became an adult, the relationship was expected to cool into a lifelong friendship.

Sex between the couples was allowable, but not compulsory, and many straight young Greeks doubtless heaved a sigh of relief when they were able to graduate to marriage and heterosexuality. However, there were conventions to be observed. The eromenos must never be buggered. The most widely approved sex act was intercrural (that is, the erastes frotted his erect penis between the legs of his beloved). The boy was not expected to show any signs of arousal; he was offering himself as a free gift to his mentor rather than satisfying his own desire.

The most famous pederastic pair were Alexander’s hero Achilles, the protagonist of the Iliad, and Patroclus. They were widely recognized as lovers, but there was some doubt in ancient times as to which of them was the erastes and which the eromenos. Plato has one of the speakers in his dialogue The Symposium (or The Drinking Party), clear the matter up.

Aeschylus [the tragic playwright], by the way, is quite wrong when he says [in his play The Myrmidons] that Achilles was the erastes of Patroclus. Achilles was the more beautiful of the two—indeed he was the most beautiful of all the heroes—and he was still beardless and, according to Homer, much younger than Patroclus.

Achilles may indeed have been beautiful and beardless, but when we first meet him in the Iliad, he is certainly not prepubertal. We must assume that the lovers had graduated some while previously into an adult friendship.

Alexander saw himself as a latter-day Achilles not only for his bravery and skill as a warrior, but also because he and Hephaestion were eromenos and erastes on the model of Achilles and Patroclus. It is a reasonable supposition that his schoolfellow was the older of the two, albeit only by a small margin. It appears that the liaison merely mimicked pederasty while being closer to a modern conjunction of more or less coeval partners.

—

THE EMERGENCIES OF REAL life interrupted the calm rural seminars at Mieza. In 340 Philip appointed his son, only aged sixteen, to be regent of the kingdom and keeper of the royal seal during his absence on a major campaign in the Thracian Chersonese. His education was over. This very remarkable promotion was not just a product of paternal love, but also a recognition of Alexander’s precocious maturity and ability.

A senior general, Antipater, was appointed as his adviser, with the task of preventing any foolish mistakes. Philip trusted him completely; once on a campaign he slept for an unusually long time and when he woke up remarked: “I slept safely for Antipater was awake.”

He seems to have thought well of his charge and allowed him latitude. In any case, the ambitious teenager seized the opportunity of power like a man offered water in a desert. He put down a rebellion by a Thracian tribe, capturing its city and replacing its inhabitants, whom he drove out, with a body of Greek settlers.

He renamed the place Alexandropolis, or City of Alexander, which may have caused the king to raise his eyebrows; Philippolis would have been rather more appropriate. The boy was getting too big for his boots and, when he clumsily tried to bribe some Macedonians to win their allegiance, his father, grandmaster of the backhander, gave him a firm dressing-down. For all that, Philip thought the world of Alexander and kept up a regular correspondence with him.

By contrast, the crown prince’s filial devotion was coming under strain. He wanted to become a great warrior and had been watching his father’s victorious progress in war after war with rising resentment. The greater his paternal inheritance, the less there would be for him to conquer. He used to say bitterly to his friends: “My father will get in before me in everything.”

And indeed Philip had been doing extraordinarily well since his first astonishing year on the throne, when he had defeated a ring of enemies by a judicious combination of force, deceit, and diplomacy. He overcame the little principalities that made up northern Macedonia and recruited their clan leaders as courtiers in Pella and as commanders in the field. These were the Companions we have previously seen. As Macedonian power grew, some of them were non-Macedonians who saw exciting career prospects under Philip (Nearchus of Crete, for example, and Eumenes his Greek secretary, whom we will meet later). These men were the poet Hesiod’s “gift-devouring lords,” who expected munificence from their monarchs. They were lavishly rewarded with land and cash for their loyalty and their labors. Their young sons were recruited as Royal Pages.

In a word, Macedonia had become a united and populous state. It was no longer a backwater that could safely be ignored.

—

THE KING’S MILITARY REFORMS were leading, as he intended, to the establishment of a substantial but expensive standing army and here he was caught in a complicated vicious circle. The more soldiers he employed, the more resources he needed to cover their cost. As a result he was obliged to go on enlarging the territories he controlled, for their tax revenues and their gold or silver mines. And then he needed even more conscripts to defend these new possessions and fight his endless wars.

Over more than twenty years, Philip massively expanded his kingdom. At its greatest extent it may have boasted a population of 500,000, far larger than that of any Greek city-state. Perhaps as early as 352, he was appointed archon (Greek for ruler) for life of Thessaly. The Thessalian plain stretches down to the famous pass of Thermopylae and lies alongside Epirus in the west, Olympias’s homeland and a close Macedonian ally. He invaded the tribal lands of Thrace and after hard-fought campaigns became their overlord. His army threatened the Bosporus. The Athenians, who had already lost their traditional influence in Chalcidice to the Macedonian king, depended on grain imports from the Black Sea and felt threatened.

They were right to worry. Philip cast his roving eye on the city-states of southern Greece, looking out for opportunity (in the historian Justin’s words) “as from a watch-tower.” A ruinous war between a small polis called Phocis and the Thebans, who were declining from their brief zenith after the battle at Leuctra but were still easily provoked, gave the king his entrée. The Phocians were responsible for guarding the oracle at Delphi, a township in its territory, perched precariously on the steep lower slopes of Mount Parnassus.

They raised large mercenary armies, which they paid for by raiding the national treasuries that stood around the shrine of Apollo. These were packed with gold and silver thank-offerings to the god of prophecy from all over the Hellenic world. The Phocians promised, hand on heart but fingers crossed behind their backs, to reimburse him.

The conflict was called the Sacred War because of the link to Delphi. The Thebans were soon on the run, suffering (in the words of a contemporary) “an Iliad of woes.” The Macedonian king decided it was his convenient duty to punish the desecrators of the holy site. To begin with Phocis did well, even beating Philip in battle on one occasion, in 353. He withdrew, but promised to return “like a ram, which next time would butt harder.”

He was as good as his word. The following year, 352 or 353, he won a decisive victory at the charmingly named Battle of the Crocus Field. The king made his men wear wreaths of laurel, Apollo’s tutelary plant, but his motive was of course strategic rather than religious. He was using the opportunity to strengthen his hold as a defender of Greek values. Hostilities persisted, but by 346 Philip had destroyed the final remnants of Phocian resistance. He was appointed president of the Amphictyony of Delphi, an association of local states charged with ensuring the oracle’s independence. Philip’s power now touched the frontier of Thebes and was within striking distance of Athens.

No one now could safely say the king was not a Greek.

—

PHILIP’S FOREIGN POLICY DID not depend simply on military force. The income from the gold and silver mines of Macedonia and Thrace brought in an enormous annual income of a thousand talents. The king began to manufacture coins, including his famous gold staters, or “philips,” as they were nicknamed. Much of this newfound wealth helped to finance his costly standing army, which included mercenaries as well as native Macedonians, but the remainder was dedicated to buying the goodwill and guest-friendship of leading Greek statesmen, even ones hostile to him. He used to admit that “I enlarged my kingdom far more by the use of gold than of weapons.”

An unfriendly critic, the contemporary historian Theopompus, thought Philip was profligate and incompetent. “He was the worst manager in the world—not only himself but also his entourage. He did not merely spend money, he threw it away.” But this was entirely to miss the point. True, Philip’s generosity was on a Homeric scale and he often found himself short of ready cash, but spraying philips around foreign governments had the intended effect. It made friends and influenced people.

Unlike his son, Philip thoroughly enjoyed sex and had affairs with young men and women. But that was entertainment; when it came to marriage, the criterion was raison d’état. Olympias was his chief spouse but by no means his only one. His contemporaries used to joke: “With every campaign, Philip married a new wife.” These unions were politically driven, perhaps temporary, and they tended to be with the daughters of rulers with whom he had been at war. The brides included Audata, an Illyrian princess; Phila, daughter of a tricky Upper Macedonian ruler; and Meda, daughter of a contumacious Thracian king. Wives sealed deals.

Philip seems to have married two women from Thessaly, which may show the importance he placed on bringing it under his control and of the complexity of its politics. Olympias was a difficult wife, but she was not at all jealous of her husband’s philandering and became friends with Nicesipolis, one of the pair from Thessaly. Nicesipolis had the reputation of being a witch; Olympias, an acknowledged expert in such matters, was asked to check her out before Philip slept with her. She met the woman and took an instant liking to her. “No more of these slanders,” she said. “You are your own best magic.” When Nicesipolis died in childbirth, the queen took her daughter into her household and brought her up.

—

PHILIP ADMIRED ATHENS, the “violet-crowned” city, its history and its culture. It epitomized the Greekness to which he and his predecessors on the Macedonian throne aspired. That did not prevent him from tricking the Athenians whenever it was in his interest to do so, nor them from obstructing his path whenever they could.

To the outside observer, the city had recovered from its total defeat, in 404, after its long war with the militaristic state of Sparta in the Peloponnese. Athens was a maritime power. After a period of quiescence it reestablished a league of island and coastal city-states in the Aegean Sea and its fleet once again ruled the waves as it had done in the fifth century. It suppressed pirates, protected its essential grain supplies from the Black Sea, and guarded against a resurgence of Persian aggression.

But first impressions can deceive. The population of adult male citizens had been devastated by the conflict, falling from an estimated 40,000 to between 14,000 and 16,250—in other words, a 60 percent collapse. There was simply not the personnel with which to restore the great Athenian empire of yore.

Also, the city had lost much of its wealth and never fully made up the deficit. From its great port at Piraeus, it could still afford to send out a fleet of one hundred warships, but not for long. What was worse, Athenians had (unsurprisingly) lost their appetite for warfare. Survivors usually opted for a quiet life and Athenians preferred to see their taxes spent at home on public works and citizens’ grants than on military adventures.

That excitable historian Theopompus may have exaggerated Athenian decadence, but he had a point when he wrote:

It is an Athenian, [who]…even on military expeditions surrounded himself with flute players and whores and harpists and grossly misused the funds appropriated for the war. However, the Athenians never gave him any trouble. On the contrary…they held him in higher regard than any other citizen. And justly so, for they themselves lived a life that tempted young men to while away their time among flute players and with prostitutes. Those who were a little older spent their days drinking and gambling and that sort of dissipation. The Athenian people as a whole spent more on public banquets and the consumption of meat than on the administration of the city.

The Macedonians knew little about the sea; from Philip’s perspective Athens, for all its flaws, still posed a threat to his growing ambition to be master of all Greece. Once his dominance was undoubted, he intended to launch a military expedition against the Great King, avenge the invasions of Darius and Xerxes, and free the Ionian city-states along the Asian littoral from Persian oppression. He aimed to march in the footsteps of Xenophon.

In 340, without many expectations, the king tried one last time to come to terms with the Athenians. He took a two-pronged approach. As we have seen, he appointed Alexander as regent and led his army to the Chersonese, his aim being to control the Bosporus. In this way he threatened the merchant shipping from grain-rich Scythia (today’s Ukraine) and denied the Athenian war fleet access to coastal ports. Then, with his sword in one hand, he picked up a pen with the other.

Philip sent Athens a long letter of complaints about the city’s unreasonable behavior. Many of these were justified, even though its author was no innocent abroad. The tone of voice was that of a reasonable man much put upon, who hoped his readers would change their minds about him.

However, the document concluded with a very firm statement of likely consequences:

These then are the complaints I have to make. You were the aggressors and, thanks to my patience, are still making further attacks on my interests and doing me all the harm in your power. So I shall defend myself, with justice on my side, and, calling the gods to witness, I shall bring my dispute with you to an issue.

The Athenians, in a jumpy frame of mind, decided to take this as a declaration of war.

Philip had allowed for the worst and was ready to react, although he was delayed by a severe thigh wound incurred during a campaign against the irrepressible Thracians. Another small war had broken out in the Amphictyony of Delphi. As its president, the king was entitled to bring his army down from Macedonia to settle the dispute, and that was what he did. But, once he was in central Greece, he laid aside pretense and marched south along the high road to Thebes and Athens. These two neighbors had loathed each other for generations, but the threat to them was palpable and immediate. They agreed to an instant entente and sent out a call for other Greek poleis to come to their aid. Within days an allied force set out to confront the Macedonian king.

—

THE PLAIN RUNS NORTHWEST to southeast and is bounded by two lines of high ground and foothills. On the south stands the acropolis of the small town of Chaeronea. From that vantage point one can look across open country and make out the river Cephisus with its mountainous backdrop a couple of miles away.

It was here that the allied Greek army chose to stand and fight the Macedonians. After Philip had tricked his way through a heavily defended pass, this was the only obstacle that prevented him from invading the homelands of his enemies. The allies had assembled some 35,000 foot soldiers and 2,000 cavalry, whereas Philip had about the same number of cavalry, but only 30,000 infantry, probably the full strength of his field army.

The king commanded a force of elite Macedonian infantry on his right wing. It faced an Athenian phalanx of ten thousand hoplites. Alexander, only eighteen, was given the crucial task of leading the Macedonian horse on the left beside the Cephisus. Four centuries later, Plutarch recalled that an oak tree by the river used to be called Alexander’s oak, because he had pitched his tent beside it on the night before the battle. Opposing him stood the Theban hoplites, headed by the Sacred Band. We do not know where the allied cavalry was placed. Perhaps they were held in reserve. In any event, they played no part in the fighting. Lightly armed troops protected both Philip’s and the Athenians’ flanks.

The allied advantage was only theoretical, for the Macedonian soldiers belonged to a full-time professional army and had years of battle experience. On the other hand, the Athenian hoplites had had only one month of regular fighting in the previous quarter of a century.

Each side had a well-thought-out battle plan. The allied line was echeloned back, or (to use the technical term, “refused”), from the Athenians on the left near Chaeronea to the right where it touched the Cephisus. This meant that the fighting would start when the Athenians and Philip’s troops on the Macedonian right engaged. If the allies succeeded in pushing the king back, their line could then swing round and attack the enemy’s center and right like a closing fan. If the Macedonians prevailed, many allied soldiers would have a good chance of being able either to run away into the southern hills or flee along the plain.

Philip’s plan was even cleverer. It depended on indiscipline among the brave but inexpert Athenians. Technically it was ambitious: it would involve the entire Macedonian line swivelling as if on a pivot. Philip would stage a managed withdrawal up some rising ground. This would stretch the Greek line, which would presumably be advancing across open ground toward the refused enemy line. At some point a gap or a thinning of the ranks would appear. Alexander on the Macedonian left would then lead a cavalry charge through the gap and the battle would, to all intents and purposes, be over.

Hostilities opened at dawn, probably on August 2, 338. As both armies were echeloned, only the Athenians and Philip’s elite troops made contact at first. In the event, Philip’s intuition about the Athenians was correct. They rushed impetuously forward and their general, one Stratocles, shouted: “On, on, on, to Macedonia!” Philip, contracting his phalanx as it pulled back behind its wall of spears, remarked: “The Athenians haven’t a clue how to win a battle.”

The gap the king had foreseen opened between the Greek center and the Sacred Band as the men shuffled leftward in order to keep in touch with the rampaging Athenian hoplites. Alexander saw it and knew his moment had come. Leading a wedge-shaped formation of cavalry, he thundered across the plain. The Thebans were soon surrounded and fighting for their lives on the riverside. The Sacred Band was destroyed where it stood.

Two miles away the king reversed his retreat and attacked the astonished Athenians. He drove them into the hills; one thousand were killed and two thousand taken prisoner. The rout soon became general.

Many centuries later, archaeologists excavated an enclosure near where the Sacred Band had fought and which was now their grave. Two hundred and fifty-four skeletons lay in seven neat rows. Out of the three hundred lovers, only forty-six had survived. Even Philip was moved. Inspecting the battlefield after the fighting was done, he came upon the corpses of the Sacred Band and is reported to have said: “Death to those who suspect these men to have done anything dishonorable.”

—

ALEXANDER WAS THE BOY of the hour, as his father generously acknowledged. It was his charge, with himself riding in the most dangerous position at the pointed apex of the cavalry wedge, that had delivered the decisive blow during the battle and precipitated the rout of the Greeks. His friends were tempted to argue that he, rather than his father, had gained the victory.

But to do so would have been a mistake. The cunning Philip deserves the credit, for he was the one who designed the plan of action—the false retreat creating the gap in the Greek line, which in turn set loose the Macedonian horse. Alexander had been no more than a piece, a high-value piece certainly, on the game board.

His father became “extravagantly fond” of him, Plutarch observed, so much so that he enjoyed hearing the Macedonians speak of Alexander as their king and Philip as their general. It was universally understood that the years of apprenticeship were over. Nobody needed to spell it out, but Alexander was heir to the throne not simply by virtue of blood, but on merit. Our sources voice no criticism of him, and evidently the royal family were united.

How then did it come to pass that within a month or two of Chaeronea, Alexander’s legitimacy was placed in question and his mother, Olympias, repudiated as an adulteress?